What's the NPS of a Tornado?

Davis tornado, October 2019

This past weekend I had the good (?) fortune to receive a front row seat to something I will remember for the rest of my life - an actual tornado in Davis, CA.  The full story and video can be found here, but, in summary, a friend and I can be heard discussing the merits of various plans to not get hit by a tornado. Which got me thinking...

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Could we process, and gather insight from, the audio captured during this event?  Needless to say, the environment in which it was recorded was not great - lots of background noise and talking over each other, not to mention that it was captured on a smartphone with the two people in the conversation were nowhere near the microphone.

That being said, we were able to capture insight, no surveys required!  Let’s start with a look at the tornado itself, recorded as it approached our position:

Since we processed the complete audio track, we can see “customer” sentiment throughout the conversation, shown below.

Customer sentiment can be tracked throughout almost any conversation

There were a few casual observations (“that’s an actual tornado”) which were scored with neutral sentiment.  Shortly thereafter, we can see a dip in sentiment (“uh...what the f***”), followed by another neutral plateau (“I think it’s going sideways”), then another dip (“unhook the trailer?”).

There’s a positive spike when I say “we’re going to have s*** hitting the RV pretty quick” (we don’t consider that a good thing, necessarily, but the positive sentiment results from the “pretty quick” statement, which is normally a good thing).  Immediately following, we can hear some expletives that dropped the sentiment back down below zero.

The mood improves momentarily when my dad decided to call me (“my dad is calling me”), but the sentiment started to nosedive again as we realize that another tornado was taking shape in front of us.

Not bad!

Moving on, you can see the products discussed during the event, as well as people involved.  Our natural language understanding engine has classified tornadoes, trailers, windows, power lines, and RVs as products, which is understandable.  Also understandable is that God is listed as a person - no doubt from an “oh my God” exclamation - but, while we welcome all religions, we also welcome the unintended humor from this “act of God”.

Our platform automatically extracts products from any conversation set…such as tornadoes, trailers, windows, power lines, and RVs.

We can also view the statements that were made and the sentiment of each.  These too can be funny - and informative - to review. It’s not surprising that “Oh s***” carries a strong negative sentiment. There’s an opportunity here for us here as well:  the statement “please move, please move”. In the near future we’re going to release our latest Contextualist engine that, in this case, would consider the above request in the context of the discussion - a tornado - and more accurately decipher the sentiment of that particular request.

While redacted here, profanity can be a strong indicator of sentiment within customer conversations

Back to the title of this post: what is the NPS of a tornado? Our algorithms processed this conversation and classified this customer to be an estimated Detractor. Not too surprising, but it’s great validation that our product is versatile enough to process discussions about nearly anything.

Who would have thought?

What tornadoes do your customers experience? We’ll help you find out in just a few minutes.